VICTORIA — The B.C. Liberal election campaign is headquartered in a modest office building in downtown Vancouver, right above the storefront for one of the city’s gold and silver buyers.

The proximity has sparked predictable laugh lines about the Liberals being able to liquidate the party silverware to pay their debts if this campaigning-for-a-fourth-term thing doesn’t work out.

Joking aside, when I visited the Liberal war room on the morning after the television debate, I found the mood to be reasonably upbeat and the party mavens still hopeful about closing the gap in the opinion polls before election day.

The walls were festooned with encouraging slogans. “It’s about the economy,” said one. “Only Christy Clark and today’s Liberals have a clear plan to control spending and grow the economy and get to a debt-free British Columbia,” said others.

There was even a Wonder Woman calendar on the wall, in tribute, presumably, to Premier Clark, who paid a morale-building visit to campaign workers Tuesday morning before heading out on a swing through the Interior.

By way of contrast, I’ve covered election campaigns that unfolded with all the grim inevitability of a march to the scaffold.

Social Credit in 1991 for instance. One of the first stops on the campaign tour was scheduled for the longtime party stronghold of Fort St. John, amid expectations that then-premier Rita Johnston could start things off on an optimistic note surrounded by grassroots supporters from the hinterlands

But the first salt-of-the-earth citizen into the room for that first event announced to the assembled media that he came because “I didn’t want to miss having breakfast with the last Social Credit premier of British Columbia.”

Which proved to be precisely prophetic. The Socreds were all but liquidated in the subsequent election, leaving the remnants to be absorbed over the subsequent decade into its centre-right successor, the B.C. Liberals.

Campaign 2001 was pretty much a death watch for the governing New Democratic Party.

Reporters still tell about the day from hell when the campaign bus for then-premier Ujjal Dosanjh got lost, stalked by a coyote, given the finger repeatedly, and wound up for a media scrum in a condom-strewn parking lot outside a livestock rendering plant on Vancouver’s waterfront.

A cabinet minister from those days took to referring to his government as “the Kursk,” after the Russian submarine that was lost with all hands. Why not the more familiar metaphor for a marine accident? “Because some people survived the Titanic.”

That proved to be close to prophetic as well, as the New Democrats managed to save only two seats in the subsequent electoral reckoning.

The B.C. Liberals are still some distance from the defeatist moods of those two electoral debacles. Perhaps they are also mindful that the outcomes of those two decade-apart campaigns were different in one significant respect, namely the resulting balance of power in the legislature.

The 2001 election really was a wipeout. Indeed, Dosanjh conceded the election when the campaign still had more than a week to run. “I get it,” he said. “I accept that I will not form another NDP government.”

Though some New Democrats have never forgiven Dosanjh for that (or for later joining the federal Liberals), at the time he threw in the towel, one opinion poll showed his party trailing by an astonishing 50 points. Plus his purpose was to plead with the voters to elect an “effective opposition” to “hold Gordon Campbell accountable.”

About 40 per cent of the electorate did cast ballots for options other than the Liberals, but only two New Democrats managed to navigate successfully through the shoals of our first-past-the-post electoral system.

The meagre Opposition presence (which Campbell, shamefully, refused to recognize in any official capacity), made it much harder to hold the government to account in the legislature, notwithstanding the remarkable and often single-handed performance of the then-leader of the NDP, Joy MacPhail.

The outcome was significantly different in 1991. The New Democrats won a more than comfortable majority of 51 seats in the then-75-seat legislature. But the voters also elected seven survivors of Social Credit, plus 17 newcomers from the B.C. Liberals.

The Liberals were inexperienced, the Socreds demoralized, still, that made for two dozen MLAs on the opposition side to hold the government to account.

The New Democrats were subjected to more heat in the legislature from the outset, and though they survived to win a second term, it was a near-run thing — losing the popular vote, but winning a majority in the seat count.

Looking to the current campaign, NDP leader Adrian Dix is fighting to win everywhere, though his party denies (not all that persuasively, in my view) that he means to crush, crush, crush the Liberals the way Campbell did the New Democrats in 2001.

The Liberals, in fighting against the odds to turn things around, are also serving the dual purpose of trying to save as much as they can of their seat complement to establish a sizable opposition beachhead for the next four years.

Plan B, one might call it. And unless the gap between the two main parties drops to the single digits very soon, I expect it will become the operative one for the Liberals as election day approaches.

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